An integrated circuit (IC) is an electronic circuit formed using a semiconductor material, such as Silicon, as a substrate and by adding (doping) impurities (dopants) to form solid-state electronic devices, such as transistors, diodes, capacitors, and resistors. The software tools used for designing ICs produce, manipulate, or otherwise work with the circuit layout and circuit components on very small scales. Some of the components that such a tool may manipulate may only measure a few nanometer across when formed in Silicon. The designs produced and manipulated using these software tools are complex, often including hundreds of thousands of such components interconnected to form an intended electronic circuitry.
Once a design layout, also referred to simply as a layout, has been finalized for an IC, the design is converted into a set of masks or reticles. During manufacture, a semiconductor wafer is exposed to radiation through a mask to form microscopic components of the IC. This process is known as photolithography. During the photolithographic printing process, radiation is focused through the mask and at certain desired intensity of the radiation. This intensity of the radiation is commonly referred to as “dose”. The focus and the dosing of the radiation has to be precisely controlled to achieve the desired shape and electrical characteristics on the wafer.
Many semiconductor devices are planar, i.e., where the semiconductor structures are fabricated on one plane. A non-planar device is a three-dimensional (3D) device where some of the structures are formed above or below a given plane of fabrication. A fin-Field Effect Transistor (finFET) is an example of a non-planar device.
Doping can be performed on a plane of a planar device, or on multiple planes of a non-planar device. Furthermore, an electrical characteristic, such as conductivity or resistivity of a layer, semiconducting behavior of a channel, and the like, are controllable through the type of dopant used for doping, a concentration of the dopant, and a depth to which the dopant is implanted into a given layer.